The Grand Palais is stunning, the domed ceiling and the intensity of the day light adds a quality to everything it houses.

So stunning and immence as Kiefer’s Sternenfall. The combination of the architectural structures and the housed spaces with walls filled from top to bottom with paintings is exemplified by the title of this series Monumenta. Anselm Kiefer was inspired by the poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann whose writings reflect on the horrors and sentiments oaround Auschwitz and the Shoah.

Concrete towers with dried sunflowers growing from the windows.


In Kiefer’s traditions, emotive layering of paint and which conveys the a pure sense of the stormy dark waters, and the magnitude of ocean’s void. Superimposed dried flowers and rusted boats floating in the cracked rippeling paint.

The floor to ceiling exhibition of paintings in several niches echoed his ideas of cosmos, nature, and void. At the entree of each niche were the poems which inspired the works. The most beautiful Pays de Brouillard by Bachmann, “for it is fogland I have seen, for it is fog heart I have eaten”.